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PeirceLibraryResources.docxViolent video games help teach youths to kill, researcher says
Source: Winston-Salem Journal (NC). 05/03/2007.
Document Type: Article
Accession Number: 2W62W62265521523
Mary Giunca
May 3--A national expert on youth and violence said last night that violent TV shows, movies and video games are the major factors that have led to the first juvenile mass murderers in world history.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired professor of psychology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, spoke last night to about 100 people at First Baptist Church on Fifth Street.
Grossman is the director of Killology Research Group, which studies destructive acts and how they affect people. He is the author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
Guns, drugs, poverty, irresponsible parents and broken families all play a part in school shootings, but never before in our culture have so many young people been exposed to violent images so early in life, he said.
"There are aliens among us," Grossman said. "They look the same on the outside, but they are wired differently."
Using images of brain scans, he compared the brain of a healthy teenager who has a low exposure to violence to the brain of a teenager with high exposure to violence.
The teen who was exposed to lots of violence showed little brain activity, particularly on the left side of the brain, which controls logic, Grossman said.
That means that such teens can't understand the consequences of their actions, whether they are skipping school or shooting their peers, he said.
He compared the effects of video games on children to the sort of high that people get from drugs or alcohol, and said that only after about a three-day period without violent images the brain scans showed a return to normal.
He is in favor of regulating violent video games, Grossman said, just as alcohol and guns are regulated, but the game industry has fought such attempts.
One of the more encouraging tools in the battle to save children from the effects of violence, he said, is the Student Media Awareness to Reduce Television, or SMART, curriculum. The curriculum urges students to wean themselves from TV, movies and video games.
Schools that have adopted the SMART curriculum are finding that their test scores are higher, and that the rates of aggression and obesity are lower, he said.
David Matthews, who attended the talk, said he has a son who is now a police detective and he was interested to hear Grossman's message.
Matthews said he was not aware of how violent some of the video games are and that he intended to visit Grossman's Web site for more information.
"I thought he was right on target," Matthews said. "I'm in favor of banning some of those video games."
Violent games and kids' behavior might surprise you
Source: Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan). 06/27/2008.
Document Type: Article
Accession Number: 2W61261299694
TOKYO _ Young people are being tragically corrupted by a seductive new form of popular entertainment. Oddly enough, this seems to happen in every generation.
In his 1883 book, "Traps for the Young," U.S. postal inspector Anthony Comstock warned of the sinful hazards of reading dime novels. In his 1954 book, "Seduction of the Innocent," child psychiatrist Fredric Wertham warned of the psychosexual perils of poring over comic books. In their 2008 book, "Grand Theft Childhood," Harvard Medical School psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson warn about video games.
The gist of their warning: Don't jump to conclusions.
Video games have a dual reputation as harmlessly exciting fun and as home training systems for mass murderers. Kutner and Olson's book shows that neither characterization is true across the board, although one of them is much closer to the truth than the other.
Using a $1.5 million grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, part of the U.S. Justice Department, Kutner and Olson set out to explore what kinds of video games children aged 12 to 14 play, how they play them, why they play them, and what relationships there might be between game habits and other behavior.
The two researchers, who are also the married parents of a video game-playing teenage son, surveyed more than 1,200 middle school students in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, along with 500 parents of those children. They also conducted focus groups of middle school boys and (separately) their parents in the Boston area.
Their survey did not directly address serious criminal behavior, in part to avoid asking kids to incriminate themselves, but their book uses statistics published by the Justice Department to conclude that "Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since."
Mass shootings at schools are the ultimate juvenile crime nightmare, but "Grand Theft Childhood" (Simon and Schuster, 260 pp, $25) cites a U.S. Secret Service study concluding that only "one in eight school shooters showed any interest in violent video games."
The couple recently discussed their own study with The Yomiuri Shimbun in a telephone interview from their home office in Boston. "What we were really looking at was the issue of violence and the typical child. That's something where we don't see evidence of any sort of worrisome connection," Kutner said. "At least not the big scary stuff, the going out and shooting or stabbing someone," Olson added.
However, they did find that kids who listed M-rated games among the ones they had played "a lot" in the previous six months were significantly likelier to have problems of a less dramatic nature, such as getting into fights with other kids, getting into trouble at school or shoplifting.
"It's true, but it needs to be put into perspective, in that the majority of kids who play them still do not get into trouble," Kutner said.
A game rated M, or mature, by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), a U.S. industry group, is suggested for players aged 17 and older. (In Japan, gamesthought suitable for the same age range are rated D by the Computer Entertainment Ratings Organization, or CERO.)
"Different groups are cherry-picking our results. There are a lot of avid gamers who are saying that we proved there was no relationship, and that's not true. We actually found that there was some correlation among normal problematic behaviors and the amount of gameplay and type of gameplay," Kutner said. "And at the same time, people on the other side, saying games are evil, were saying: 'Look! They're showing this.' Back when Grand Theft Auto IV was released (in early May), we did a lot of interviews, and there were several stations in Boston that interviewed Cheryl (Olson). And she told them essentially the same thing in the individual interviews.
"And that evening one of them set up the story saying, 'Experts say there's nothing to worry about,' which isn't what we say. And they showed her quote. And another station said, 'Experts say there's a lot to worry about,' and they showed the same quote."
"Pretty much the same quote," Olson said.
"There are times when people will not let information interfere with their preconceived notions," Kutner concluded.
Their survey was conducted at the end of 2004, not long after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released. It was no surprise that the GTA games collectively ranked No. 1 in the titles most frequently played by boys. But they were surprised to see the famously violent game series come in second on the girls' list (after The Sims, which didn't even make the boys' top 10).
"Anecdotally, it sounds like (girls) play it a little bit differently than the boys do," Kutner said.
"We had a couple of young college student research assistants who were telling us about how they played it," Olson explained. "And they would drive around and go to the mall and shop for clothes and things. But I'm sure there must be some girls who are also playing it to get their anger out, though, and that's what our 'reasons for play' questions suggested. Many boys are using violent games to manage their emotions and get their anger out and so on, but there's a substantial number of girls who may be doing that as well."
Boys who vent their frustrations by shooting monsters are not likely to do the same with people because they have a better grasp of the distinction between fantasy and reality than adults sometimes give them credit for. One finding pointing at this idea is that kissing and swearing were the two things that boys mentioned most often when describing why they thought their younger siblings should not be allowed to play certain games.
Olson said that "swearing and kissing ... are things that they or their little siblings can do in real life. That really struck us as great evidence of how good they were at distinguishing fantasy versus reality, if they were zeroing in on the two things that were possible to do in the real world."
"You know," she joked, "girls are much scarier than zombies, because girls are real."
Discussing boy-girl relations in a more serious vein, Olson described a game called Def Jam Vendetta, which features "rappers that are wrestling or fighting each other. And as you get higher in the levels, you start to win women as trophies. The sexism is something that I think Larry (Kutner) and I both strongly object to. Were our son 13 or 14 today, I would have much more concern with him playing a title that glorifies sexism and (shows) women as objects to be won than a game that has him blasting away at some aliens."
An intriguing sidelight in "Grand Theft Childhood" is that for boys (although not yet for girls), playing games together, talking about games and sharing game techniques has become such a mainstream method of socializing that it is the kids who don't play who are now de facto abnormal. Olson cautioned that no real conclusions could be drawn about this group in the study because their numbers were too small for statistically significant findings.
But as for the overall results, Kutner mentioned one excellent reason to have confidence that the kids had reported accurately on the role of video games in their lives: "Unlike a lot of research that is done on students, this was something they were interested in."
What Research Says About Video Games And Violence In Children
Authors: Ari Shapiro
Source: All Things Considered (NPR). 03/08/2018.
Document Type: Transcript
Guest: Donald Trump; Douglas Gentile
Accession Number: 6XN201803082004
Database: Newspaper Source
ARI SHAPIRO: President Trump has held a series of White House meetings on gun violence, and the focus of today's was video games. Lawmakers, parent advocates and people from video game companies were invited to talk with the president. The press was not allowed in. Trump has been focused on this subject for a while now. Here's what he said a couple weeks ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts.
SHAPIRO: The central question at the heart of this White House meeting is, does playing violent video games turn people into real-life shooters? Douglas Gentile has researched this issue. He's a psychology professor at Iowa State University. Thanks for joining us.
DOUGLAS GENTILE: My pleasure.
SHAPIRO: If you could just begin with the conclusion of your research - if every violent video game disappeared tomorrow, would there be fewer mass shootings?
GENTILE: We don't know the answer to that, but that's because aggression is actually very complicated. It's multi-causal. No one single thing causes it. And when we've had a school shooting, we usually ask the wrong question. We ask, what was the cause? And then we point around at different things such as mental health or violent video games or poverty or whatever. And none of them is it. What is it is when you put them all together. And so would it reduce the risk - yes. How much - we don't know.
SHAPIRO: So if we take a step back from mass shootings and say how much does playing violent video games increase real-life violence and aggression, do we have a clear answer to that?
GENTILE: We have a clear answer when we're talking about aggression. So aggression is any behavior - that could be a verbal behavior, a physical behavior or a relational behavior - that is intended to harm someone else. So if you give someone the cold shoulder, that is aggressive. But that's different from violence, which is only physical and extreme such that if successful, it would cause severe bodily damage or death. And the research on media violence and aggression seems pretty clear - that the more children consume media violence, whether that's in video games, TV or movies, they do become more willing to behave aggressively when provoked.
SHAPIRO: You sort of conflated video games, TV, movies there. In a video game, you're pretending to be the shooter. You're interacting with a virtual world. TV or movies is much more passive. Is there an important distinction there, or is violence violence in media no matter whether it's interactive or passive?
GENTILE: We used to think that video games would have a much larger effect than passive media like TV or movies. But the research has not seemed to bear that out. It seems to be about the same size effect, which is somewhat surprising because they are active, and you are being rewarded for it. But basically what we're coming down to is learning. We can learn from all of these different ways. And it seems we don't learn particularly differently from video games than from TV or movies.
SHAPIRO: Some people have offered a theory that videogames can be catharsis, and expressing violent impulses in a virtual world helps people not express those in the real world. Has that been disproven?
GENTILE: That has been disproven. So how do you memorize a phone number? You repeat it. Does seeing it one more time take it out of your brain? That would be the catharsis idea, right?
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Right.
GENTILE: But, no, each new time you see it burns it in a little deeper. So in fact, there's no possible way that catharsis can happen, at least not nearly the way people like to talk about it.
SHAPIRO: Do you think the premise of this White House meeting is flawed? I mean, should video games be one focus of this debate over gun violence in America?
GENTILE: I do think it's flawed. I think the problem is that we're seeking a simple solution to a complex problem. And I noticed there are no real aggression researchers at this White House meeting. So we're not even getting the real picture. What we're getting is just a very one-sided and very limited look into only one of the risk factors for aggression.
SHAPIRO: Professor Gentile, thanks very much.
GENTILE: My pleasure.
SHAPIRO: Psychology professor Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University.
